Thursday, May 12, 2016

Fantasy magazines in English, August 1957 cover-dates...

Sadly, not a review I could write quite yet if I wanted to, since I don't have any of these issues so far, but August 1957 is one of those dates for which there were at least two more magazines available than would be the next month...and it's notable that all the magazines, as they usually did, feature at least some arguable science fiction along with the fantasy fiction, with the possible exception of Dream World. The sf audience had been somewhat more self-aware than the fantasy audience for some years among magazine readers, as sales figures for the magazines that emphasized sf or fantasy tended to suggest. Another 1957 issue I don't have is of the most famous little magazine devoted to fantasy of that year, Joseph Payne Brennan's Macabre, where the second issue is dated Winter and where none of the stories nor poetry gathered has been reprinted, any more than most of what's cited below, except Brennan's own contribution, in a small-press collection of his work, many years later. Perhaps it was an uninspired season....Cover images, indices and background information from the FictionMags Index and ISFDB. Click on cover images to enlarge.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in one of the last Anthony Boucher-edited issues, has a range of rarely-reprinted fiction in it, and may be one of the more heavily sfnal issues of Boucher's solo editorship. Robert Heinlein's "The Menace from Earth" is the most famous story here, and the only one I've read is Isaac Asimov's pun vignette "A Loint of Paw"...the Walter M. Miller, Jr., cover story, "The Lineman," took a while to be reprinted, and a while longer to be gathered finally in a Miller collection, his 1980 career Best-of. The one I'm most curious about is a collaboration between Damon Knight and Kenneth Bulmer, "The Day Everything Fell Down"...like most of the stories here, either not reprinted or reprinted only in the French edition of F&SF,Fiction. I'll look forward to reading Boucher's take on this set of books, and an instance of Joseph Samachson/William Morrison's "The Science Stage" theater reviews not paired with Charles Beaumont's "The Science Screen" (the other way around was far more common).

Fantastic had for its August number one of the sleazier covers it could boast of, which, considering some of the competition thus, is pretty impressive. Also typically for a Paul W. Fairman issue, from his middle year as editor of sorts, this features an impressive set of writers producing what is probably not even close to their best work: three stories, under three bylines, by Henry Slesar, one each from Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and G. Harry Stine. Not a single story so far reprinted except by the less discriminating issues of Sol Cohen's second-run magazines after he bought the Ziff-Davis rights. No obvious evidence that Ed Valigursky's cover painting illustrated any of the stories. Perhaps for the best, if so.

Fairman also got to supervise word-lengths, if he didn't delegate that task to his eventual successor Cele Goldsmith, for the new and folded with this third, August, issue magazine, Dream World. Jerry House has warned readers here that there is no real reason to try to read this title at all, except perhaps for the two marquee items in the first issue, a Thorne Smith reprint and a P. G. Wodehouse original story, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was to agree if I try. More unreprinted stories by Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and in this one Stephen Marlowe/Milton Lesser, under a less-remembered pseudonym "Adam Chase"...your guess is as good as mine who contributor "Forest Norton" might be (perhaps even a one-story writer by that name), though if G. F. Vandenberg was a pseud, it was a reasonably frequently-employed one by someone. DW ran a sheaf of cartoons in the back pages of this issue. Jerry doesn't cite them in his regular bad jokes feature.

Also vanished with the August issue, its second, was Tales of the Frightened, which was tied up eventually with an abortive radio reading series featuring Boris Karloff (though what Karloff ended up reading to record were vignettes by Michael Avallone, who also was able to publish several editions of his texts in paperback, including two vignettes in the issues of the magazine, attributed in the issues to Karloff himself...the Karloff recordings were eventually released on a record album). A whole lot more unreprinted stories by notable writers, usually signing their usual bylines, in this magazine put together by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. Two of the other stories in this issue managed to get a reprint, the one Mack Reynolds put his usual byline on (he also wrote one as by "Mark Mallory") and one Avallone signed his name to was reprinted in Sam Moskowitz's anthology of stories involving Edgar Allan Poe as a character. First issue of Tales had a decent-enough cover...they didn't even try on the second...aside from typoing Poul Anderson's name on that cover. Despite a banner claim of All New fiction, one story here is a reprint, A. Bertram Chandler's, from the Scottish magazine Nebula Science Fiction. "Claude Ferrari" certainly sounds like a pseudonym...but so does "Sidney Porcelain," yet that apparently was that writer's usual byline, at very least.

In England, the one "open" fantasy-fiction magazine to have an August 1957 issue was Science Fantasy, the stablemate of the better-remembered sf magazine New Worlds, which also offers an apparently not-bad but unexceptional issue, with two stories reprinted from the U.S. magazine Future Science Fiction and one original story that got a little reprint attention, Brian Aldiss's (which also didn't make it into one of his own collections till decades later). John Boston, in his and Damien Broderick's critical study of the magazine, Strange Highways, notes that the Pressle cover story is pretty weak (despite a fine cover), while the Lowe story and the two American reprints are rather better.

While not as durable as Science Fantasy, much less Fantastic nor the only survivor here, F&SF,Fantastic Universe did run through most of the 1950s, usually seen as a reasonable salvage market for material that didn't quite make the F&SF cut, and less disliked a magazine than at least the Fairman Fantastic was by many constant readers...even when editor Hans Stefan Santesson, as he does in this issue, thoroughly indulges his fascination with (and makes a commercial pitch via) UFOlogy articles. Meanwhile, there's one story in this issue which is wildly better remembered than any other with this month-date except the Heinlein, William F. Nolan's sf/horror story "Small World"; otherwise, a mix of work by eventual veterans in fantastic fiction and rather unprolific folks...and perhaps the ugliest cover of the five, despite being the work of a past master, Virgil Finlay. (As a magazine title, Fantastic Universe has been, with some justice, cited as one of the more ridiculous among the professional magazines in the field's history...but it does suggest both fantasy and sf...and it's an oddly cheerful phrase, taken one way...the more-cosmic sequel to It's a Wonderful Life...)

5 comments:

Must admit, that functional, Mondrian style TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED cover would put me right off, no matter how vulgar and how pulpy the other are by comparison - but there you you, letting my cro-magnum low brow hang all the way out!

These fiction digests in the 1950's are still available for inexpensive prices. At the Windy City Pulp convention in April, I saw many priced at $1.00 or $2.00 each. In the auction 73 GALAXY'S in nice shape went for only $50.00. I have all these except for the DREAM WORLD title. I never bothered collecting it.

Well, Sergio, do look at the not-bad, if nothing extraordinary, first FRIGHTENED issue's cover...where they make the Other rookie mistake of putting No writer's names on. I'd say the others aren't so pulpy as in one way or another failed attempts to refine pulpiness...the FANTASTIC cover, one of several on Fairman issues implying this is just before some sort of monster's assault on a woman or women, is particularly meretricious, but coaxing a bad, rather than the occasional merely functional, cover out of Finlay, or even the slightly oddly GGA cover of the F&SF, just sort of suggest a sad lot, artistically if not also in actual collective mood. The SCIENCE FANTASY cover is a handsome image, at least.

Walker, I do need to get my finances in order so I can trust myself around a magazine show, or a decently-stocked secondhand store, as Jeff Segal and Jeff Cantwell have been pointing me toward in the local area. At least one of the FANTASTIC issues, devoted somewhat to wish-fulfillment fantasies, that inspired the launch of DREAM WORLD was also the site of Kate Wilhelm's first published story, plucked from the slush by Cele Goldsmith in perhaps her first major discovery.